The Blacksmith Bureau

almost everyone who investigates or studies the case in detail is troubled by ...........

Why don’t they believe us?

But from the beginning of the investigation the parents’ words failed to convince.

The first officers on the scene, while not suspicious of the pair, were unable to share the self-evident certainty of an abduction that the parents, sometimes impatiently, sometimes hysterically, pressed on them.

Both the written statements of the parents and their friends and the printed timeline which they offered to the police, a document in which weird and disturbing exactitude about the nine adults’ own movements was combined with a void about the child herself, created a sense of unease amongst the investigators.

While the parents, as befitted their special role, were not immediately challenged, we now know that as early as May 10 the police had switched from suspicion to active disbelief of the group version of events, for Gerry McCann overheard Oldfield’s sobs in the face of shouted claims that he was lying.

From then until September the .................

...........even some of their supporters noticed the strangled caution with which they expressed themselves and a certain tension that was hard to put down purely to grief at the loss of their daughter.

Just what is it about them?

Critics were troubled, and with good reason. Even when they were safely back in England, even after the investigation ..................

Of course they weren’t at ease, they’d lost a child! Of course they couldn’t speak freely, there were the secrecy rules, or the mysterious and sepulchral “operational reasons” quoted so self-importantly by Clarence Mitchell.

And of ...............

If we knew we wouldn’t tell you

And then, in May 2011, Madeleine was published and, astonishingly, blew the gaff and turned our suspicions into facts.

Kate ........................

much more likely was a repeat of Gerry McCann’s performance in front of the Media, Culture and Sport Committee, .................

Still, it would be worth a look, if only to see if anything had changed.